Here is a confession from someone who watches television for a living: during awards season, almost nothing makes me want to keep watching when I get home. Sterling Point did. Prime Video screened the first two episodes of Megan Park’s eight-episode series this week, followed by a Q&A with Ella Rubin and Jay Duplass moderated by Variety’s Angelique Jackson, and I walked out already planning the rest of my weekend around it.
The pitch sounds like standard YA. Annie Jacobson (Rubin), a tightly wound 17-year-old New Yorker, inherits an island in Muskoka, Canada from a grandfather she never met, along with her twin brother Connor (Keen Ruffalo). What she finds there, including a half-sister she didn’t know existed (Amélie Hoeferle’s Ramona), unspools the story her adoptive father Steven (Duplass) has been telling her for her entire life. On paper that is a mystery-box show. In practice the writing is so specific, and the people in it so lived-in, that I spent the first episode assuming it was adapted from a novel. It isn’t. Park created it from scratch, with Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage co-showrunning under their Fake Empire banner and LuckyChap producing. All eight episodes are streaming now, and Prime Video renewed it for a second season in August.
“This was not a mystery show”
Rubin said Park was blunt about that from the start. The secrecy is the hook, she explained, but what Annie finds out matters far more than the finding out, and the show gets its biggest reveal on the table fast. That tracks with what’s on screen: by the end of Episode 2 you know who Ramona is. The series isn’t interested in making you wait for it.
What Park was interested in, Rubin said, was subverting the type-A teenage girl. Annie is a perfectionist, but the show meets her at the moment “her proverbial rubber band” starts to snap, a version of that character Rubin felt she hadn’t seen much of. She was candid that she shares Annie’s old perfectionist streak but none of her organizational skills. “I am extremely, extremely type B,” she said, to laughs, before Duplass pointed out that she had just spent ten minutes describing her night-before-shooting freak-out rituals.
Finding out alongside the audience
Neither actor had the full season when they signed on. Rubin had one or two scripts; Duplass had read two and did not know he was, in his words, “kind of the villain of this television series.” He called the process of learning what was happening with Steven “a nice mystery for me.” Rubin described it as an accidental privilege: she was discovering Annie’s story at roughly the same pace Annie was.
That made tracking the character’s arc a real job, especially shooting out of order. Rubin said she did a lot of timeline mapping to know exactly where Annie was physically and emotionally in every scene, from the “baby in a tie” pseudo-adult we meet in Episode 1 to the kid who finally learns to relax into Muskoka. The costume team built the same transformation into the clothes.
A father and daughter who’d already rehearsed
The pair first worked together on Netflix’s The Chair, shot at the height of COVID with crew in scrubs. Rubin was 18 or 19 and, by her own account, terrified; Duplass was the lead and, she said, immediately made her feel normal. So when she found out he would be playing her father, she was “overjoyed” and instantly calmer.
Duplass, who had a 17-year-old daughter at home while shooting, said what drew him to Steven was how direct he is with his kids, a register he recognizes from his own parenting and one he rarely sees on screen, where parent-child scenes tend to get played “cutesy or kid gloves.” He also flagged the thing that makes Steven more interesting than a villain: there’s real compassion written into the character, and he and Annie are, as he put it, “subliminally married,” a dynamic he sees constantly in real families. He noted that the season’s ending points toward individual storylines for the adults, and cited Friday Night Lights as the model for a kid-centric show whose parents quietly become the point.
Jackson asked how it felt watching Rubin carry the series. “Is it weird to say I’m super proud?” Duplass answered. He credited Park for the show’s hardest trick, keeping every scene dramatically grounded and funny at once, and added, to a room full of press, that when every actor in a show is good, it’s because the director is good.
The sisters, the twins, and summer camp
Rubin called Hoeferle one of her best friends in real life, which made the early episodes, in which Ramona has to be cruel to Annie, hard on Hoeferle: she kept apologizing between takes. Rubin’s favorite thing about the show is the way Park flips the genre’s templates. The yearning, she said, isn’t romantic; it’s Annie for her late mother Goldie. And the enemies-to-lovers arc is Ramona and Annie. The show spends its romance structure on sisterhood and friendship first.
The twin banter with Ruffalo, she said, took no work at all. Duplass described Ruffalo as “the mayor of base camp,” loitering outside trailers with his little dog, waiting for someone to come out and talk. The young cast stayed in the same Muskoka hotel, one with water slides and zip lines, and Rubin said she went through the same loosening-up as Annie: she arrived wanting to be hyper-professional and perfect, and her castmates got her onto the slide. Duplass, for the record, says he was in his room Zooming with his kids and writing screenplays.
The scenes they circled
Asked which scene gave each of them the night-before dread, both named the finale. Duplass called the last scene of Episode 8 a turning point for the whole show and for Steven specifically, and said that by the time he got there, the writing and the preparation meant his only job was not crying the moment Rubin opened her mouth. Rubin named the same scene, a line Annie finally says to Steven that she described as the culmination of everything from Episode 1 on, and added a second: an Episode 6 monologue in which Annie realizes how much of her childhood she may have skipped, which she and Park worked out together during the episode built around Maple’s first period.
The thing she took away from the whole shoot, she said, was learning to trust herself: Park built a set where she could try something, fail, and learn from it. “You win or you learn,” she offered, then immediately admitted she didn’t come up with that. Jackson let her keep it.
And for the ship-minded: when Jackson raised Steven and Denise (Missi Pyle), Rubin didn’t hesitate. “Season two. We have high hopes.” Duplass’s only note was that he’d need a step ladder.
Sterling Point season one is streaming on Prime Video. Season two is in development.
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